Why Your Customer Centricity Transformation Keeps Failing—And What James Clear’s Atomic Habits Reveals About the Fix

Posted on February 12, 2026 by | Leave a comment

The real reason your CX initiatives stall has nothing to do with strategy. It has everything to do with habits.

Adapted from Source: Clear, J. (2018). Atomic habits: An easy & proven way to build good habits & break bad ones. Penguin.

I recently spoke with a CEO who had invested $2.5 million in a “customer transformation” initiative. New CRM. Journey mapping workshops. Customer experience training for 400 employees.

Eighteen months later, their NPS had barely moved.

“We did everything right,” she told me. “Why didn’t it stick?”

The answer lies in a book that has nothing to do with customer experience: James Clear’s Atomic Habits.

Clear’s central insight is deceptively simple: You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

Applied to customer centricity, this means your organisation will never achieve customer-centricity through projects and initiatives. It will only become customer-centric when the right behaviours become automatic—when they become habits embedded in your culture.

This is why so many transformation programs fail. They focus on goals (improve NPS by 15 points) rather than systems (the daily behaviours that make customer-centricity inevitable).

The Brutal Math of 1% Daily Improvement

Clear introduces what he calls the “aggregation of marginal gains”—the compounding effect of small improvements. Get 1% better each day, and you’re 37 times better after a year. Get 1% worse, and you decline to nearly zero.

Most leaders understand this intellectually. Few apply it to culture.

Consider: What if every meeting in your organisation started with a two-minute customer story? Not a metric. A story. One customer. One experience. Every meeting.

That’s not a transformation initiative. It’s a habit. And over 250 working days, it means your organisation engages with 250+ real customer experiences—building what I call “customer muscle memory” throughout every function.

This is exactly what happened at Canon Medical Systems ANZ. When we worked with Managing Director Monica King and her team, they introduced a simple but powerful habit: adding ‘customer stories’ to the agenda of every meeting across the organisation. Not data. Not dashboards. Real stories about real customers. Over time, this single practice—what we call “putting the customer in the room”—built customer muscle memory throughout every function and contributed to revenue growth at a compound annual rate of 12.5%.

The question for you as a leader is not “How do I transform my organisation?” It’s “What small habits, repeated daily, will compound into a customer-centric culture over time?”

Identity Over Outcomes: The Mindset Shift Most Leaders Miss

Clear’s most powerful insight is this: True behaviour change is identity change.

Most organisations approach customer-centricity as an outcome: “We want to improve customer satisfaction.” But outcomes don’t drive behaviour. Identity does.

The difference:

  • Outcome-based: “We want better NPS scores.”
  • Identity-based: “We are an organisation that obsesses over customer outcomes.”

When customer-centricity becomes who you are, rather than what you’re trying to achieve, decisions become easier. An employee doesn’t need to consult a policy manual to know whether to accommodate a customer request. They already know the answer because it’s aligned with the organisation’s identity.

At Ritz-Carlton, employees don’t follow a rulebook when a guest has a problem. They operate from an identity: “We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” That identity gives them permission to spend up to $2,000 per guest to resolve issues without management approval.

The MRI Benchmark we’ve developed at MarketCulture measures eight behavioural dimensions of customer-centric culture. But behind those behaviours is something more fundamental: identity. Organisations that score highest don’t just do customer-centric things—they are customer-centric at their core.

The Four Laws of Customer-Centric Habit Building

Clear outlines four laws for building habits that stick. Here’s how they apply to embedding customer centricity into your organisation’s DNA:

Law 1: Make It Obvious

Habits begin with cues—triggers that prompt behaviour. If customer-centric behaviours aren’t cued into daily workflows, they won’t happen.

Wright Medical (now part of Stryker), the orthopaedic device company, understood this at a visceral level. They placed a fully dressed skeleton in their main executive meeting room—a permanent, unmissable reminder that the patient was always in the room when decisions were being made.

Not a poster. Not a mission statement on the wall. A skeleton.

Every budget discussion, every product decision, every strategic debate happened under the gaze of the customer they existed to serve. It’s impossible to forget who you’re working for when they’re sitting at the table with you.

This is Clear’s “Make It Obvious” principle in its most powerful form. Jeff Bezos famously kept an empty chair in meetings to represent the customer. Wright Medical went further—they made the customer impossible to ignore.

We’ve seen the same principle work at scale. When we partnered with Canon Medical Systems ANZ, Managing Director Monica King adopted what we call the “customer in the room” practice—adding a customer story to the start of every meeting across the organisation. Through their “monomania” meetings, leadership consistently communicated the customer intimacy strategy, and the simple act of sharing real customer experiences made the customer’s presence felt in every decision. Within two MRI assessment cycles, Canon Medical saw improvements across all eight behavioural disciplines, with strategic alignment showing the most significant gains.

The Application:

  • Create physical, unavoidable reminders of the customer in decision-making spaces
  • Place the customer at the top of every meeting agenda—not as optional, but as default
  • Display real-time customer feedback in common areas and dashboards
  • Begin every strategy document with “Customer Impact” as the first section
  • Make customer data visible to everyone, not locked in the CX department

The Diagnostic Question: If I walked through your office or joined your executive meetings, how many visible reminders of the customer would I encounter? Would a newcomer immediately understand who your organisation exists to serve?

Law 2: Make It Attractive

We repeat behaviours that feel rewarding. If customer-centric actions are perceived as additional work or compliance, they’ll be resisted.

This is where purpose becomes a powerful accelerant. When we worked with Dr David Cooke, the first non-Japanese Managing Director of Konica Minolta Australia, he faced initial resistance from senior leaders who dismissed customer-centricity as “soft stuff” that wouldn’t help in their “dog eat dog” competitive environment. David’s breakthrough was connecting customer-centricity to a broader identity that made people feel proud. He articulated a vision for Konica Minolta to become “famous as a company that cared”—caring about employees, customers, and the community.

The MRI assessment we conducted achieved a 90% participation rate, signalling employees’ desire to be heard. But what made customer-centric behaviour truly attractive was the company’s community engagement—partnering with not-for-profit organisations addressing human trafficking in Cambodia and launching an ethical sourcing program months before Australia’s largest companies followed suit. A 25-year veteran employee captured the transformation perfectly: he said he now proudly told everyone where he worked because of the company’s social impact. When customer-centricity aligns with something employees genuinely believe in, it stops feeling like compliance and becomes purpose.

The Application:

  • Celebrate customer wins publicly—not just revenue wins
  • Share customer success stories where employee actions made the difference
  • Connect individual roles to customer outcomes so people see their impact
  • Link customer-centricity to a broader purpose that gives employees pride in where they work
  • Create rituals that make customer focus feel energising, not burdensome

The Diagnostic Question: Do your people feel genuine excitement when they solve a customer problem, or does “customer focus” feel like another corporate mandate?

Law 3: Make It Easy

The most effective way to build habits is to reduce friction. If customer-centric behaviour requires extra steps, approvals, or effort, it will lose to easier alternatives.

At Vodafone, we saw this challenge at global scale. Under CEO Vittorio Colao, the company’s NPS scores remained stagnant despite significant investment in customer experience. The problem wasn’t a lack of commitment—it was that 3,500 leaders across 28 business units worldwide had no simple, shared framework for making customer-centric decisions. Every market was interpreting “customer focus” differently, creating friction and inconsistency.

Working with Vodafone’s Global Head of Customer Experience, Raja Al-Katib, we deployed the MRI across all 28 business units and then co-developed the “Vodafone WE CARE” framework—a set of clear, simple guiding principles that made it easy for any leader in any market to know exactly how to prioritise customer needs. Instead of complex playbooks or lengthy training programmes, WE CARE gave leaders a shared language and a straightforward decision-making lens. The result: Vodafone moved from being the NPS leader in 11 of 22 markets to leading in 19 of 22 markets, and EBITDA swung from a decline of 8.3% to positive growth of 5.8%.

The Application:

  • Give frontline employees authority to resolve issues without escalation
  • Remove the layers between customer feedback and the people who can act on it
  • Simplify the process for anyone to share a customer insight
  • Create a shared framework that makes it easy for leaders at every level to make customer-centric decisions without ambiguity
  • Design systems that make serving the customer the path of least resistance

The Diagnostic Question: How many steps does it take for an employee to do the right thing for a customer? How many steps to do nothing?

Law 4: Make It Satisfying

We repeat behaviours that produce immediate rewards. Customer centricity often feels unrewarded because results take time to materialise.

This is where measurement becomes your greatest ally. At Deutsche Telekom, Beatrix Kapitany, Head of Customer Experience for the ATS wholesale division, knew that a lack of collaboration between divisions was eroding customer relationships. But she struggled to convince colleagues of the seriousness of the issue—because there was no visible evidence of progress or regression.

When we deployed the MRI across ATS and their internal partner division NWI, the baseline scores gave everyone a shared starting point. More importantly, when the follow-up MRI assessment eight months later showed a 9-percentage-point improvement across the board, that visible progress became deeply satisfying for the teams involved. Employees reported a substantial increase in customer-focused discussions. Engagement rose across both divisions. And Beatrix herself was promoted to Head of Network Infrastructure Solutions at Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier—a tangible reward for driving cultural change. The MRI made the invisible visible, turning abstract cultural effort into concrete, satisfying progress.

The Application:

  • Create immediate feedback loops that show the impact of customer-centric actions
  • Recognise and reward customer-focused behaviours, not just customer outcomes
  • Share “customer hero” stories in team communications
  • Use regular cultural measurement (like the MRI) to make progress visible and celebrate improvement
  • Track and celebrate leading indicators of customer health, not just lagging metrics

The Diagnostic Question: When someone goes above and beyond for a customer, what happens? Is it noticed? Rewarded? Ignored?

Environment Design: Your Hidden Lever

Clear emphasises that the environment shapes behaviour more powerfully than motivation or willpower. Your organisational environment—systems, processes, incentives, structures—is either making customer-centricity automatic or making it difficult.

Most leaders try to change behaviour through training and exhortation. It rarely works. What works is designing an environment where the desired behaviour becomes the default.

Wright Medical (Stryker) didn’t train their executives to remember the patient. They redesigned the environment so forgetting became impossible. That skeleton did more for patient-centric decision-making than any number of workshops or values statements ever could. Similarly, Canon Medical’s “customer in the room” practice, Konica Minolta’s purpose-driven community engagement, Vodafone’s WE CARE framework, and Deutsche Telekom’s visible MRI scorecards all represent environmental redesign—changing the context so that customer-centric behaviour becomes the default rather than the exception.

Consider:

  • Incentive Structures: Are your people rewarded for short-term transactions or long-term customer relationships?
  • Information Flow: Does customer feedback reach decision-makers in hours, days, or weeks?
  • Decision Rights: Can frontline employees act on customer needs, or must they escalate?
  • Meeting Rhythms: Is the customer discussed only in quarterly reviews, or daily operations?

When I work with organisations using the MRI framework, the greatest leverage often comes not from training or initiatives, but from redesigning the environment. When you make it easier to be customer-centric than not to be, transformation follows naturally.

Why Most Leaders Give Up Too Soon

Clear warns about the “Plateau of Latent Potential”—the period where consistent effort produces no visible results. Most people give up during this phase, just before the breakthrough.

Customer culture works the same way.

You can implement the right habits, design the right environment, and shift toward a customer-centric identity—and see nothing change for months. Metrics stay flat. Sceptics grow louder. The temptation to abandon the approach intensifies.

This is precisely when most organisations quit.

The breakthrough comes later. Customer-centric habits compound invisibly until they reach a tipping point. Then, seemingly overnight, customer satisfaction improves, employee engagement rises, and competitive differentiation becomes apparent.

Vodafone’s transformation is a case in point. Their cultural shift was a sustained, three-year effort that included continuous MRI assessments, leadership workshops with the top 250 leaders, and ongoing reinforcement through the WE CARE framework. The payoff—NPS leadership in 19 of 22 markets and a 14-percentage-point swing in EBITDA—didn’t come from a single initiative. It came from patient, compounding commitment to the right habits over time.

The organisations that achieve true customer centricity are not those with the most sophisticated CX programs. They are those with the patience to maintain the right habits through the plateau.

From Goals to Systems: A Practical Framework

Most organisations set customer-centric goals: improve NPS by 10 points, increase customer retention by 15%, reduce churn by 20%. These goals are useful for measurement but useless for behaviour change. They tell you where you want to go, not how to get there.

Systems, by contrast, are the daily processes that produce results:

Goal → System

  • Improve NPS → Start every meeting with a customer story
  • Increase retention → Review at-risk customers weekly as a leadership team
  • Reduce churn → Empower frontline staff to resolve issues on first contact
  • Build customer insight → Require every product decision to include customer evidence

The shift from goals to systems is the shift from aspiration to action. It’s the difference between hoping for customer centricity and building it.

Where to Begin: The MRI as Your Cultural Diagnostic

Before you can build customer-centric habits, you need to know your starting point. Most leaders operate with blind optimism about their culture—they believe they’re more customer-centric than they actually are.

This is where measurement becomes essential.

The Market Responsiveness Index (MRI) assesses your organisation across eight behavioural dimensions that define customer-centric culture:

  • Customer Insight — Do you truly understand your customers’ needs and experiences?
  • Customer Foresight — Can you anticipate where your customers are heading?
  • Competitor Insight — Do you understand your competitive landscape?
  • Competitor Foresight — Can you anticipate competitive moves?
  • Peripheral Vision — Are you aware of broader market shifts affecting your customers?
  • Collaboration — Do teams work together around customer outcomes?
  • Strategic Alignment — Is your strategy connected to customer needs?
  • Empowerment — Can your people act on customer needs without bureaucratic friction?

This diagnostic reveals where your customer-centric habits are strong and where they’re weak. It shows you exactly where to focus your 1% daily improvements for maximum compounding effect.

The Question That Changes Everything

James Clear asks a simple question that cuts through complexity: “What would a person who is [desired identity] do in this situation?”

Applied to your organisation: “What would a truly customer-centric company do right now?”

If you don’t know the answer instinctively—if you need to consult policies, run analyses, or seek approvals—then customer centricity hasn’t yet become your identity. It’s still an aspiration.

The path from aspiration to identity is paved with habits. Small behaviours, repeated daily, compounding over time.

Not transformation programs. Not training initiatives. Not technology investments.

Habits.

Your Next Step

If you’re serious about building a customer-centric culture that endures, start with measurement. Don’t assume you know where you stand.

The MRI Benchmark gives you an honest assessment of your customer-centric culture—not what you hope it is, but what your people actually experience.

From there, you can identify the specific habits that will compound into sustainable competitive advantage.

Because in the end, your organisation won’t rise to the level of your customer-centricity goals.

It will fall to the level of your customer-centric habits.

Discover your organisation’s true customer-centricity baseline →

Dr. Chris Brown is CEO of MarketCulture Strategies and co-founder of MRI Benchmark. He is the author of “The Customer Culture Imperative” and “The Human Culture Imperative.”

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How to Ensure Your 2026 Strategy Doesn’t End Up as a Collection of Cake Recipes

Posted on February 5, 2026 by | Leave a comment

The Secret Ingredient in Strategy

My first serious job was at Cadbury.

I took it partly because they were the biggest employer in town — but mostly because I’ve always had a weakness for chocolate.

Six months in, I was given a major responsibility: producing the Annual Corporate Plan for Cadbury’s headquarters in Bournville, England. My boss shared a surprisingly simple recipe for success:

  • Talk to a few engineers
  • Find some good photos of the factory
  • Extrapolate the numbers to show a 10% return on assets
  • And most importantly, make the final document thick and heavy

A Strategy So Good You Could Eat It

I spent three months creating that “proper” plan. It was approved, sent to head office… and promptly disappeared into a black hole.

The following year, I handed the task to my assistant with one piece of advice: “Make it thick. It doesn’t really matter what’s inside — we’ll never hear about it again.” She took me literally. To add weight, she filled sections of the strategy with her favourite cake recipes.

The plan was approved without a single question. Months later, my wife was baking from one of those recipes. When she asked where I found it, I told her the truth: “It’s from our corporate strategy — and it’s the best part of it.”

Why This Story Matters Now

In the 1970s, we could afford to laugh at a strategy padded with sponge cake.

Markets were stable. Competition was limited. Inflation was predictable. A bloated strategy caused little damage.

That world no longer exists.

Today we operate in an environment of:

  • Constant disruption and volatile markets
  • Hybrid and remote workforces
  • Rapidly shifting customer expectations
  • Technology moving faster than leadership cycles

In this context, a strategy that exists only as a heavy document on a shelf isn’t harmless — it’s dangerous.

If your strategy isn’t actively guiding decisions, you’re not just wasting time. You’re exposing your business to real risk.

Is Your Strategy Aligned — or Just Heavy?

A modern strategy must be lean, focused, and market-responsive.

If leaders and employees aren’t aligned on how value is created and delivered, growth stalls. You cannot run a 2026 business with a 1970s “recipe book” approach to strategy.

So here’s the real test:

If you hid a sponge cake recipe in the middle of your current corporate strategy, how long would it take for someone to notice?

The Strategy Reality Check: Weight or Value?

Ask yourself:

The “Sponge Cake” Test: If a core assumption in your strategy proved wrong today, how long would it take frontline employees to notice — and how long before the C-suite reacted?

Bulk vs. Brevity: Is your strategy valued for its size, or is it clear enough that employees can articulate the top three priorities for delivering customer value — and how they contribute?

Historical Extrapolation: Are your projections based on last year plus a percentage, or do they account for shocks, uncertainty, and rapid change?

Strategic Alignment: Is your hybrid and remote workforce as aligned with growth goals as those who sat in the office five years ago?

Frontline Engagement: Do employees see the strategy as an accounting exercise to be filed away — or as a practical guide for daily decisions?

Responsiveness Gap: Is your organisation designed to respond quickly to market and regulatory change — or still operating with the assumptions of restricted competition?

The Real Secret Ingredient

Here’s what most strategy processes miss:

The best strategies aren’t invented in boardrooms.
They’re discovered by listening to employees.

Your people already know:

  • Where customers struggle
  • Where processes break down
  • Where opportunities are being missed
  • Where leadership assumptions don’t match reality

They see the obstacles blocking growth every day — but most organisations never ask them in a structured, meaningful way.

Instead, leaders rely on spreadsheets, forecasts, and presentations that look impressive… and reveal very little.

From Guessing to Knowing

At MarketCulture, we believe strategy should be built on truth, not assumptions.

That’s why we created the MRI Diagnostic.

Just like those hidden cake recipes, every organisation has blind spots:

  • Disengaged employees
  • Broken processes
  • Frustrated customers
  • Silent barriers to growth

The MRI Diagnostic surfaces these realities by listening to the people who know your business best — your employees — and translating their insight into clear, actionable strategic alignment.

Because in today’s world, the most powerful strategy isn’t the thickest one. It’s the one grounded in reality.

Book a conversation with MarketCulture and discover how the MRI Diagnostic can help turn insight into growth.

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How Lexus Lost a Lifelong Customer Over One Hour—And What It Reveals About Your Blind Spots

Posted on January 29, 2026 by | Leave a comment

The Story Behind the Shiny Badge

I was talking with a friend recently about his new Lexus. It’s a beautiful piece of engineering, and he loves driving it. But when I asked if he would buy another, his answer was a flat “No”.

For a brand that treats “personalized service” as its North Star, that “No” should make every executive in the building lose sleep.

The High Price of Inflexible Rules

The trouble didn’t start with the car; it started with a clock. Lexus called him for a software upgrade and offered a home pickup with a loan car—exactly what his contract promised.

My friend is a late-night worker. When the service department insisted on a 7:00 am pickup, he simply asked for 8:00 am.

The answer? “Not possible”.

This wasn’t an isolated incident. It was the third time he had run into a brick wall of “the rules”. To him, it felt like the people at Lexus simply didn’t care to understand why he needed that extra hour.

The Silent Killer: Leadership Blind Spots

On paper, everything looks perfect to Lexus leadership.

  • The Service Rep followed the procedure to the letter.
  • The Salesman is busy chasing new commissions, having never checked in on my friend since the sale two years ago.
  • The “Rule Book” is intact.

But underneath the surface, customer churn is rising. When rigid compliance takes the place of human empathy, employees stop reporting the “bad news” that leaders desperately need to hear.

How to Find What Your Customers Aren’t Telling You

Even a successful giant like Lexus has blind spots. The only way to uncover them is to look at the “MRI” of your organization—a diagnostic for your leaders and employees to see what is really happening.

It’s designed to expose:

  • Rigid processes that frustrate your best customers.
  • A lack of empowerment among your frontline staff.
  • Hidden risks that are quietly killing your brand loyalty.

Don’t wait for your best customers to say “No” before you decide to listen. I mean “really listen”.

Use this checklist to determine if your business is inadvertently pushing loyal customers toward your competitors.

  • The “Rule Book” Test: Can your frontline staff deviate from standard operating procedures to accommodate a reasonable customer request without seeking management approval?
  • The Silence Gap: Does your sales team have a structured “after-care” protocol to provide guidance and advice years after the initial transaction?
  • The “Why” Audit: When a customer makes a request that is denied, is the reason for the request recorded and analyzed by leadership, or is it simply logged as “not possible” or not logged at all?
  • The Empowerment Metric: Are employees incentivized to report friction points in the customer journey, even if those points reflect poorly on current “efficient” processes?
  • The Signal-to-Transaction Ratio: Are your KPIs focused solely on “successful” transactions (like a completed software upgrade) while ignoring the “discontent signals” generated during the process?
  • The Personalized Reality: Does your marketing promise “personalized service” while your infrastructure enforces “rigid compliance”?
  • The Churn Diagnostic: Do you know exactly why your last ten “lost” customers chose not to return, or are you relying on the assumptions of busy managers?

At MarketCulture, we turn organizational blind spots into sources of competitive power.

Your people on the front line already know what’s holding the business back — but that truth rarely makes it to the boardroom.

If you genuinely want to understand what is limiting your organization’s performance, book a call with MarketCulture using the link below.

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The 4 Ways CEOs of Million-Customer Companies Stay Connected to Reality

Posted on January 25, 2026 by | Leave a comment

When a company grows from a handful of employees to thousands, when customers multiply from dozens to millions, something profound happens. The once-crystal-clear connection between leadership and customers becomes obscured by layers of management, data reports, and operational complexities.

But the truth is, the moment leaders lose touch with their customers’ experiences is the moment a business begins its decline.

So how can leaders of large businesses maintain that vital connection to customer reality? — not as a luxury, but as a necessity.

The Danger of Disconnection

Think about companies that once dominated their industries but eventually failed. Kodak, Blockbuster, Nokia. What united them? Their leadership lost touch with evolving customer needs. They listened to internal voices rather than customer signals.

In contrast, companies like Amazon have thrived because, despite their enormous scale, their leadership maintains an almost obsessive focus on customer experience. Jeff Bezos famously kept an empty chair in meetings to represent the customer, ensuring their perspective was never forgotten.

Four Vital Sources of Customer Truth

So how can leaders stay connected? I’ve found there are four essential channels that provide the truth about customer experience, even at a large scale.

1. Customer Metrics: The Quantitative Compass

Numbers tell stories. Key metrics provide our first window into customer reality:

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measuring customer loyalty and likelihood to recommend
  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Gauging immediate satisfaction with interactions
  • Customer Effort Score (CES): Evaluating how easy we make things for customers
  • And my personal favorite, the POC or ” Pissed Off Customers” measure: A blunt but honest assessment of where we’re creating frustration

These metrics provide a dashboard, but they’re just the beginning. Numbers without context are like trying to understand a person solely by their vital signs—necessary but insufficient.

2. Employee Stories: The Front-Line Reality

Your employees—especially those on the front lines—are living repositories of customer truth. They hear the unfiltered feedback, feel the emotional temperature, and witness the unscripted moments.

When I was at Hewlett-Packard, our most important product improvements came not from formal research but from our support team sharing stories about customer pain points. These narratives gave the data a human dimension.

Great leaders create channels for these stories to flow upward. Town halls, skip-level meetings, and “day in the life” programs all ensure that the richness of customer reality reaches leadership.

3. Direct Experience: The Irreplaceable Immersion

Nothing—absolutely nothing—replaces direct experience. Leaders must regularly put themselves in the customer’s shoes.

  • Try to purchase your own product through your website
  • Call your own customer service line
  • Use your product in the real world, not in a controlled demo
  • Sit with customers as they interact with your offering

These experiences create what I call “visceral knowledge”—understanding that lives in your gut, not just your head. It creates urgency that spreadsheets cannot.

4. Deep Listening: The Unfiltered Truth

Finally, create opportunities to hear directly from customers, unfiltered by layers of organization:

  • Customer advisory boards with direct leadership involvement
  • Executive sponsorship of key accounts
  • Regular customer roundtables led by senior leaders
  • A systematic review of customer feedback, especially complaints

This direct listening catches signals that might otherwise get lost in translation.

Putting It Into Practice

Let me share a simple framework for incorporating these sources of truth into your leadership rhythm:

  1. Weekly: Review key customer metrics in leadership meetings
  2. Monthly: Read unfiltered customer feedback and employee stories
  3. Quarterly: Engage in direct customer experiences
  4. Annually: Conduct deep listening sessions with diverse customer segments

When done consistently, this rhythm creates what I call “customer muscle memory”—an intuitive sense of your customers that informs every decision, even when they’re not explicitly represented.

The Ultimate Leadership Question

I’ll leave you with this: the ultimate test of customer connection is whether you can answer one simple question: “What is it actually like to be our customer today?”

Not what it was like last year. Not what you hope it will be next quarter. What is it like today, in all its messy, imperfect reality?

If you can answer that question with confidence, specificity, and honesty, you’re connected. If you can’t, no amount of business success can protect you from eventual disruption.

Because in the end, scale doesn’t change the fundamental truth of business: we exist to serve our customers. The moment we forget that is the moment we begin to fail.

If you want to stay connected to customers, try out the MRI Benchmark and engage them in the conversation!

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10 Barriers to Building a Customer-Centric Culture—And How to Overcome Them

Posted on August 14, 2024 by | 3 comments
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Creating a customer-centric culture isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a business imperative. But many leaders struggle to get there. Here are the top 10 factors working against building a customer-centric culture, actionable strategies to overcome them, and real-world examples of leaders who made it happen:

  1. Lack of Leadership Commitment
    Barrier: Without top-down commitment, customer-centric initiatives often fizzle.
    Solution: Leaders must champion customer-centricity, making it a core value. It starts by taking an honest look at how customer centric the company really is…not what leaders think it is.
    Example: Jeff Bezos at Amazon prioritizes customer obsession, integrating it into every company decision.
  2. Siloed Departments
    Barrier: Departments working in isolation lead to fragmented customer experiences.
    Solution: Foster cross-functional collaboration with shared customer-focused goals.
    Example: Zappos breaks down silos by empowering every employee to deliver exceptional customer service, regardless of department.
  3. Short-Term Focus
    Barrier: Focusing solely on quarterly results can undermine long-term customer relationships.
    Solution: Balance short-term targets with long-term customer loyalty strategies.
    Example: Adobe shifted from product sales to subscriptions, focusing on long-term customer engagement.
  4. Inadequate Customer Insights
    Barrier: Decisions made without deep customer insights often miss the mark.
    Solution: Invest in tools and processes to gather and analyze customer data.
    Example: Netflix uses data analytics to understand viewer preferences, creating content that resonates with their audience.
  5. Resistance to Change
    Barrier: Organizational inertia can stall customer-centric initiatives.
    Solution: Lead with change management strategies that emphasize the benefits of customer-centricity not just to the organization but to individuals and their teams.
    Example: Microsoft, under Satya Nadella, embraced a growth mindset, leading to a more customer-focused culture.
  6. Poor Communication
    Barrier: Miscommunication between teams and customers can erode trust.
    Solution: Establish clear, consistent communication channels focused on customer needs.
    Example: Slack improved customer communication by integrating feedback loops into their product development process.
  7. Misaligned Incentives
    Barrier: Employees may prioritize the wrong things if incentives don’t align with customer-centric goals.
    Solution: Align rewards and recognition with customer-focused outcomes.
    Example: Ritz-Carlton empowers employees to spend up to $2,000 per guest to resolve issues, incentivizing top-notch customer service.
  8. Underestimating Employee Experience
    Barrier: Disengaged employees lead to disengaged customers.
    Solution: Invest in employee engagement and create a customer-centric internal culture.
    Example: Southwest Airlines prioritizes employee satisfaction, knowing that happy employees create happy customers.
  9. Lack of Accountability
    Barrier: Without accountability, customer-centric initiatives can lose momentum.
    Solution: Establish clear ownership and accountability for customer outcomes.
    Example: Apple’s “DRI” (Directly Responsible Individual) approach ensures that someone is always accountable for customer-centric results.
  10. Ignoring Customer Feedback
    Barrier: Failing to act on customer feedback leads to missed opportunities for improvement.
    Solution: Create systems for gathering, analyzing, and acting on feedback.
    Example: Toyota’s “Customer First” philosophy ensures customer feedback drives continuous organizational improvement.

Real Success Comes from Taking Action

These barriers are common, but they’re not insurmountable. Leaders who commit to overcoming them are seeing actual results—like Amazon’s relentless focus on customer obsession or Microsoft’s transformation under a customer-first mindset.

Ready to take your business to the next level? Start by setting a baseline to see where you stand and get the actionable insights you need to make progress with the MRI Benchmark.

The rewards are clear: increased customer loyalty, stronger brand reputation, and sustainable business growth.

What steps are you taking today to overcome these barriers? Which of these are the biggest inhibitors in your company?

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How can you lead like Jeff Bezos of Amazon?

Posted on July 20, 2024 by | Leave a comment

Jeff Bezos is one of the most successful business founders and leaders of modern times; in fact, what he has achieved is proof of the importance of customer-centricity and the need to build customer-centric cultures. So, how can you develop some of his leadership capabilities that will help you in your business?

You can follow these practical steps:

1. Develop a Customer-Obsessed Mindset

  • Know Your Customer: Invest time in understanding your customers’ needs, preferences, and pain points.
  • Create a Customer Feedback Loop: Establish systems to regularly gather and analyze customer feedback.
  • Innovate for the Customer: Develop products and services with the customer’s needs at the forefront.

2. Foster a Culture of Innovation

  • Encourage Experimentation: Promote an environment where risk-taking and experimenting is encouraged, even if it leads to failure.
  • Celebrate Failures: View failures as learning opportunities and share lessons learned with the team.
  • Allocate Resources for Innovation: Dedicate time and budget for innovative projects and ideas.

3. Think Long-Term

  • Set Visionary Goals: Develop and communicate a clear, long-term vision for the company.
  • Invest in Future Growth: Make decisions prioritizing long-term benefits over short-term gains.
  • Be Patient: Understand that significant achievements often take time and sustained effort.

4. Make Data-Driven Decisions

  • Collect Relevant Data: Implement systems to gather data on performance, customer behavior, and market trends.
  • Analyze and Act on Data: Use data to drive decisions and strategies. Regularly review key metrics and adjust plans as needed.
  • Encourage Data Literacy: Ensure your team has the skills to interpret and use data effectively.

5. Set High Standards

  • Define Excellence: Clearly articulate what excellence looks like for your organization and set high standards accordingly.
  • Hold People Accountable: Ensure that everyone understands and meets these high standards.
  • Lead by Example: Demonstrate commitment to high standards through actions and decisions.

6. Embrace Change and Adaptability

  • Stay Agile: Be willing to pivot strategies and adapt to changing market conditions.
  • Encourage Flexibility: Foster a culture where employees are comfortable with change and can adapt quickly.
  • Monitor Industry Trends: Keep an eye on industry developments and emerging trends to stay ahead.

7. Delegate and Empower

  • Trust Your Team: Delegate tasks and responsibilities to capable team members and trust them to execute.
  • Empower Decision-Making: Allow team members to make decisions and take ownership of their work.
  • Provide Support and Resources: Ensure your team has the tools and resources needed to succeed.

8. Communicate Clearly and Transparently

  • Be Direct and Honest: Communicate with clarity and honesty, both internally and externally.
  • Share Vision and Goals: Regularly update your team on the company’s vision, goals, and progress.
  • Encourage Open Dialogue: Foster an environment where feedback and communication are encouraged.

9. Focus on Talent Acquisition and Development

  • Hire the Best: Look for top talent and ensure they align with your company’s values and goals.
  • Invest in Development: Provide opportunities for continuous learning and growth for your team members.
  • Build a Strong Culture: Create a workplace culture that attracts and retains high-caliber individuals.

10. Practice Frugality

  • Optimize Resources: Be efficient with resources and seek ways to reduce costs without compromising quality.
  • Encourage Resourcefulness: Foster a mindset of doing more with less and finding innovative solutions to challenges.
  • Evaluate Spending: Regularly review expenses and cut unnecessary costs to maintain financial health.

By incorporating these practices into your leadership style, you can emulate Jeff Bezos’s approach to building and leading Amazon.

A great place to begin your customer-centric journey is with the MRI Benchmark, a tool leaders use to build strong customer capabilities across their team, department, or organization.

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Customer Centric Culture as a “Product” consumed by employees

Posted on April 7, 2024 by | Leave a comment
quote_on_customer_culture_as_product

The term culture is a loaded term, often associated with misalignments between what an organization professes to be and how it actually operates. So many companies do it so poorly that cynicism can be very strong when it comes to attempts to understand or change things.

Dharmesh Shah, cofounder of Hubspot found this out the hard way when he was asked to solve for “culture” at Hubspot early on in the businesses development.

Brian Halligan, Dharmesh’s cofounder just attended a CEO networking group and said “I hear this culture thing is really important.” Culture had never been mentioned ever prior to this conversation… Culture had come up as being something that maybe they should pay some attention to as it might have an impact on how they scale and continue to be successful during rapid growth.

Brian said “Dharmesh can you go do that culture thing.” Dharmesh responded “Wow from what little I know about culture it sounds like it sort of involves people, I like people but I don’t really like being around a lot of people…seems like I would be the wrong person but anyone I am a team player so let me see what I can find out.”

Dharmesh began by gathering some inputs from employees to try and determine how they would describe the existing culture.

The responses shocked Dharmesh, there was a visceral negative reaction to the idea of organizational culture. Much of this came from the disconnection many employees had experienced when working at other organizations where what they said and what they did was incongruent.

One of them said what are you doing Dharmesh? What’s next are you going to put up posters on the wall about excellence? Hubspot is not the company I thought I joined!

Dharmesh pushed again regardless of the negative reaction as he knew it was important to find out more.

He decided to use the NPS framework to ask employees how likely are you to recommend working at Hubspot? and why?

What did Dharmesh find? That employees like working at Hubspot because of the other employees… not very actionable. But it led to Dharmesh defining what are the attributes of those people that work at Hubspot and this became the basis for describing the original culture in the Culture Code Deck

Culture as Product

“Every company builds two products, one is the product they build for the customers and the other is the product they build for their team” – Dharmesh Shah

The number one mistake founders make, according to Dharmesh, is they believe their job is to preserve the culture. That is not the job because the needs of customers change and the needs of employees change and so culture always needs to be iterated and developed, it never stops.

This is one of the reasons we built the MRI Benchmark as it is designed to help you understand how customer centric you are today and to maintain and improve your level of customer centricity over time.

The forces dragging your organization away from customers as your business grows are strong. By having some measure of customer centricity you will always have a strong north star.

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What do customer-centric CEOs do to build customer-centric cultures?

Posted on March 28, 2024 by | Leave a comment

Customer-centric leadership is a management approach that places the customer at the center of an organization’s strategy, operations, and decision-making processes. It involves creating a culture where every employee, from the frontline staff to the top executives, is focused on delivering exceptional customer experiences and maximizing customer satisfaction. Here’s an example of customer-centric leadership:

Imagine a telecommunications company called “TelcoFlow,” which specializes in mobile phone plans for businesses. The CEO, Sarah, embraces customer-centric leadership and instills this mindset throughout the organization. Here’s how she demonstrates customer-centric leadership:

1. Setting the vision and tone: Sarah communicates a clear vision that puts customers first. She emphasizes that the company’s success depends on understanding and exceeding customer expectations. This vision is reinforced in company meetings, training sessions, and internal communications.

2. Empowering employees: Sarah empowers employees at all levels to make decisions that benefit customers. She encourages frontline staff to go the extra mile in resolving customer issues and providing personalized service. Employees are trained to anticipate customer needs and proactively address them.

3. Gathering customer insights: Sarah ensures that the company consistently gathers customer feedback through surveys, social media monitoring, and direct interactions. She personally reviews customer feedback and shares insights with her leadership team and employees, using this information to drive product development, customer service improvements, and strategic decisions.

4. Fostering collaboration: Sarah fosters cross-functional collaboration between departments to deliver seamless customer experiences. Regular meetings are held where marketing, sales, operations, and customer service teams discuss customer pain points, feedback, and ways to enhance the overall customer journey.

5. Leading by example: Sarah sets an example by regularly interacting with customers, whether visiting retail stores, attending customer events, or responding to customer inquiries personally. She actively listens to customer feedback and takes personal responsibility for addressing any significant issues or concerns.

6. Celebrating customer success: Sarah celebrates customer success stories and shares them across the organization. Employees who go above and beyond in serving customers are recognized and rewarded, reinforcing the customer-centric culture.

Through Sarah’s customer-centric leadership, TelcoFlow has developed a reputation for exceptional customer experiences, resulting in high customer loyalty, positive word-of-mouth, and strong financial performance.

Employees feel empowered and motivated to contribute to the company’s customer-centric mission, fostering a cycle of continuous improvement and customer satisfaction.

While much of this is well known today, the question is how do you know whether your company is truly customer-centric? And what areas you should focus on to improve.

The MRI Benchmark is the tool leaders use to assess and improve their customer-centric culture and you can now try it for free: www.mribenchmark.com

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Posted in Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Obsessed Leadership, Customer-Centricity

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Applying Ethan Evans’s (Ex-VP at Amazon) Secrets of the Magic Loop to Your Career Development as a Customer Experience Professional

Posted on January 26, 2024 by | Leave a comment

As a Customer Experience (CX) professional, we are always looking for ways to improve the customer journey and our career growth. One of the most effective ways to do this is to apply Ethan Evans’s Magic Loop approach to your career development. Ethan Evans is a former VP at Amazon with extensive first hand experience of what it means to be customer-obsessed. His Magic Loop approach has helped numerous professionals achieve their career goals. I have adapted his model to add my take on it but of course all the credit goes to Ethan for developing this great model. You can see the full model laid out here. Let’s dive into how you can apply this approach to your own career development.

Step 1: Self-reflection – Are you doing the best job you can in your current CX role?

The first step to applying the Magic Loop approach is simple but critical: Self-reflection. Take a moment to reflect on your current position and assess your career goals, what you want to achieve, and where you want to be in the future. Analyze your CX strengths and weaknesses, which areas interest you, and what you would like to learn and improve. Are you strong in customer survey research? Great dealing with customers one on one? Able to build journey maps? Can you influence team or organisational culture to be more customer centric? Are you good at building CX business cases?
Make a list of actionable steps to achieve these goals and develop a plan with a practical timeline. The more specific and measurable the objectives, the better you will be able to increase your skills and improve your career growth.

Step 2: Experimentation – How can you help your manager?

The Magic Loop approach suggests that experimentation is essential to career development. Ask your manager what you can do to help, then do it. Be open to new experiences, take advantage of networking opportunities, and exit your comfort zone. Try and learn new things, take new courses, involve yourself in different projects, or volunteer to gain new skills. Engage leaders in other functions, gain a broader and deeper perspective of the business. Exploring new areas can help you see opportunities from different perspectives, allowing you to utilize various perspectives to solve problems more effectively.

Step 3: Make sure you implement

Whatever your manager asks, take it on, get it done. After this experimentation, evaluate your experience and knowledge. Reflect on the new skills you’ve learned and explore how they can be used to enhance your career development. Analyze whether the skills align with your career goals, the challenges you faced, what you enjoyed, and what you found challenging. Use this feedback to adapt your plan and determine what steps you need to take to continue your learning journey.

Step 4: Ask your manager how you can develop further so you can advance your CX career

The final step is to collaborate with your manager to advance. Use the evaluation feedback to improve your plan and reinforce your strengths. Identify what areas you want to improve and focus on learning new skills relevant to your career goal. Seek feedback from your manager, colleagues and other leaders, and identify gaps between your current skills and your career goal. Use this feedback to tailor your personal development plan so that it aligns with your career goals. This feedback loop mirrors the one that many of you are responsible for in your organizations, the customer feedback loop.

Step 5: Do as they recommend to improve your value.

Again make sure you take on their recommendations and stretch yourself to demonstrate your value as a CX pro, take on a new challenge that will grow your competency and contribute to the business.

Step 6: Advanced Magic Loop. Suggest your own ideas!!!

Ethan recommends for those who are more advanced in their careers that they recommend ideas.

You could use language like this to suggest an idea, “I noticed that we are becoming a little too internally focused and sometimes we forget to get customer input. I’ve been thinking we could get the team’s input by running a simple customer-centric culture assessment to gather everyone’s view. Would that be helpful?”

The most successful CX professionals we know have taken on the challenge of influencing their organisations level of customer centric culture. What better way to have impact than to help change the environment within which your organization operates!

In fact as I am writing this post, there is a team of awesome CX professionals enrolled in the Masters of Customer Experience Management at Michigan State University currently undertaking their own projects to determine their organizations’ level of customer centricity.

For them it is a great way to get their senior leaders involved in a conversation while providing valuable data on how they benchmark versus the best and uncover the hidden factors that maybe stopping their organization’s growth.

Repeat this Magic Loop!

Conclusion:

Ethan Evan’s Magic Loop approach is a proven way to build your career. Its cycle is designed to encourage movement and improvement. As a Customer Experience (CX) professional seeking career development, using the Magic Loop approach can help you achieve your goals and reach your true potential. The Magic Loop approach will allow you to assess your current career position, encourage experimentation, assess your learning experience, and reinforce your new skills while closing the gaps.

So, take that first step today, and start experimenting, why not try the MRI Benchmark, a customer-centric culture assessment tool, and witness the magic of the loop approach unfold in your career!

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How do you persuade others to help you create a customer-centric culture?

Posted on September 13, 2023 by | Leave a comment

Daniel H. Pink, author of the 2012 best-selling book “To Sell Is Human” provides a great example of how to persuade others with the right questions. The example he gives is related to parenting however the method applies equally to influencing others to consider new approaches or changes such as building customer-centric cultures.

In this 4-minute video, Dan explains the concept of motivational interviewing. Specifically, this involves asking someone to rate their own readiness to start doing something you think is important. This will lead them to articulate their honest reasons for not doing it currently. From there, you can influence them to adhere to desired behavior more easily.

How does this relate to our customer culture tool? The business MRI? 

Well, this is exactly how the MRI Benchmark assessment works. It prompts self-reflection on the 8 disciplines of customer culture, where do I rate the organization high, where are we low? And what do others in the organization think about where we stand?

The MRI Benchmark asks leaders the right questions, it gets them to think about what they are doing and whether it truly is customer-centric behavior.

This creates a tension that requires action, if scores are lower than expected a natural drive kicks in to want to improve. The journey towards a more customer-centric better performing business has begun!

Importantly once a benchmark is established you can focus on what obstacles need to be overcome to build a truly customer-centric culture.

It is actually not that hard.

Check out the MRI Benchmark today for just $US1…

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Posted in Change Leadership, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership

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